The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox

Chapter 38: Porridge and Cabbage Soup

After that, we entered the New Year season. At least, so I gathered from the preparations in the Caltrop Pond Water Court. There was no change at Honeysuckle Croft, but the little dragon king and his courtiers (and his servants) observed the appropriate festivities. A watered-down version, anyway.

My first inkling of the upcoming holidays came one miserably cold night when I met Bobo by the pond. She was curled up on the same rock that she and Stripey been standing on the first time I saw them. It was their designated meeting place, where she waited every night to see if he'd gotten time off from highway robbery. I'd coopted it for our handoff spot, where she'd give me ale for my offering, but she always insisted on lingering well into the party in case he showed up.

Normally I had no objections – no one important arrives at a party right when it starts anyway – but it was particularly cold that night, and I wanted to get into the water and out of the wind. Bobo, however, wouldn't hear of waiting for Stripey indoors.

"It's the Eighth!" she insisted.

The Eighth of what? I asked, grumpily walking to her other side to use her as a windbreak. (In case you were wondering, no, snakes don't make great windbreaks.) Pulling my head and legs into my shell helped. Marginally.

Why didn't I just go in without her, you might ask? Well, I couldn't explain it either, which only made me grumpier.

"The Eighth of the Bitter Moon! Isssn't it ex-sssiting?"

Meh, okay, yes, in the sense that it heralded the coming of the holiday season near the end of one year and the beginning of the next. But the Feast of the Eighth wasn't much in and of itself. Its signature dish was eight-treasure porridge, for Heaven's sake: a peasant dish consisting of different types of rice supplemented by dried fruit, beans, and nuts. No matter how you dressed it up, in the end, it was just boiled rice. I'd always considered the Eighth to be a lead-up to the real festivities.

But Bobo was dancing around on her coils, making her an even more unreliable windbreak, and singing, "I'm sssuper ex-sssited! It's gonna be a feassst, and we're gonna get all the food we can eat, and there's gonna be tons and tons of eight-treasure porridge!"

Ah, now her excitement made more sense. If tonight's party were a feast that happened to include porridge as one of the side dishes, that was much better.

Let's go in then, I proposed.

"But Ssstripey," she protested. "He isssn't here yet. We have to wait for him. They don't ssseat you until the whole party is here."

To me, that seemed like even more of an argument to go inside now, before all the good seats were taken. If we're approaching the New Year, people are starting to travel, to go home to visit their parents and such. Stripey's going to be very busy for the next moon, I reminded her.

Bobo wavered, twisting her head as if that would make the duck materialize out of thin air, the way Flicker had. For a moment, I wondered what the clerk was up to, and what the eight-treasure porridge in Heaven looked like. I'd bet Aurelia had supervised its preparation.

Bobo's fretting yanked me back down to Earth. "Oooh, but he always comes to the feasssts. We go to the feasssts together every year. It's our thing. He knows I'm waiting. He wouldn't not ssshow up without telling me firssst...."

It's okay, this year you have me!

"That's true...."

She was right about to cave when a dark shape appeared in the distance. It lifted one wing and waved it.